Later science fiction futures were largely dystopian, moving from bleak technofascism into some kind of stone-age barbarism, as in Cloud Atlas, or else, studiously ambiguous: the writers remaining coy about the dates, which renders “the future” a zone of pure fantasy, no different really than Middle Earth or Cimmeria. They might even, as with Star Wars, place the future in the past, “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” This Future is, most often, not really a future at all, but more like an alternative dimension, a dream-time, some kind of technological Elsewhere, existing in days to come in the same sense that elves and dragon-slayers existed in the past; just another screen for the projection of moral dramas and mythic fantasies. Science fiction has now become just another set of costumes in which one can dress up a Western, a war movie, a horror flick, a spy thriller, or just a fairy tale.

But it’s equally possible to imagine a future where the only culture is niche culture, and commercial success becomes irrelevant (or maybe even an anchor).
18 Yeah, I know: This sentence is fucking confusing. But it’s more straightforward than it seems: Our present time will eventually become the past, hence the designation “present (past).” Our future will eventually become the present, hence “present (future).” It’s kind of like the prologue to Star Wars, where we are told that the following events happened “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” But the people in Star Wars shoot laser guns and travel at the speed of light, so we are forced to conclude that their past is our future.
19 Here’s a simple way to parse this not-so-simple description: Play the song “Rock and Roll” by Led Zeppelin. Based on a traditional twelve-bar blues progression, “Rock and Roll” is the only song in the Zeppelin catalog that is literally rock and roll music, unless you count “Hot Dog” and “Boogie with Stu.”

An application built with Dojo
This is in not an exhaustive list, but as you can clearly see, there are quite a few to choose
from. This list barely scratches the surface of what’s available today. Of course, while all of
these are fine toolkits, we’re here to talk about one that’s not in that list, one that I feel is quite
possibly the best available today: Ext JS.
15
16
Ch aPt er 1 ■﻿ INtr ODU C ING W eB DeVeL OP M e N t W I t h e X t JS
Enter Ext JS: The best of the bunch
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (more precisely, early 2006, the planet Earth), a gentleman by the name of Jack Slocum developed a set of extension utilities to the YUI library. These
utilities rapidly gained popularity within the YUI community and were quickly organized into
an independent library called YUI-Ext. In fall 2006, Jack released the .33 version of this new
library under the terms of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license.

One could argue that the racism of The Mummy is merely period detail, or that the gags zip by so quickly that they don’t have a chance to stick; I find, however, that they hang around while the rest of the movie fades. It’s a shame, because much of The Mummy is a blast, and you cheerfully root for Brendan Fraser; he promises such innocent fun, and yet the film teases the innocence away from him. Lady, there’s something in this movie. In a word, ignorance.
MAY 10, 1999
THE PHANTOM MENACE
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, people made movies with people in them, and some of those movies made sense. Then something happened, and the people started to vanish from the movies, along with most of the sense. For a while, the spectacle was fun to observe, but slowly the pictures tipped into insanity, or, at any rate, into the hypnotically bad. The joke was that the number of viewers willing to submit to such hypnosis went not down but through the roof.